Leading Medical Marijuana activist Dennis Peron dies at 72

Dennis Peron, known as the father of medical marijuana in the US, died in a San Francisco hospital on Saturday after a long battle with lung cancer. He was 72.

Peron’s brother, Jeffrey Peron, confirmed the news on his Facebook page. “A man that changed the world,” he wrote on Facebook. “It is with a heavy heart that I announce the passing of my brother Dennis Peron.”

Peron was a driving force behind a San Francisco ordinance allowing medical marijuana- a move that later aided the 1996 passage of Proposition 215 that legalized medical use of marijuana in California, the nation’s first state-wide medical marijuana legalization law.

However, Peron opposed the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (Proposition 64), a voter initiative passed in 2016 that legalized the recreational use of marijuana for those aged 21 years and above in the state.

Significantly, Peron was among the first people to argue about the benefits of marijuana for AIDS affected persons in the late 1980s.

In 1991, Peron founded the first public cannabis dispensary, the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club, in the country during the height of the U.S. drug war. He and a friend distributed pot to AIDS patients, got busted several times and was shot in the leg by a police officer, The Chronicle reported.

The pot club served 9,000 clients before it was closed by a judge.

Born in New York, he was drafted in the late 1960s to serve in Vietnam, where he first encountered cannabis, his brother posted on Facebook.

The Vietnam War veteran spent some of his last years on a farm in Lake County, growing and giving away medical marijuana.